Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/380

 354 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1856,

and also to some fair daughter of the earth. Unless these two were fast friends before mar riage, and so are afterward, there will be but little peace in the house.

TO HARBISON BLAKE (AT WORCESTER).

CONCORD, December 31, 1856.

MK. BLAKE, I think it will not be worth the while for me to come to Worcester to lecture at all this year. It will be better to wait till I am perhaps unfortunately more in that line. My writing has not taken the shape of lectures, and therefore I should be obliged to read one of three or four old lectures, the best of which I have read to some of your auditors before. I carried that one which I call &quot; Walking, or the Wild,&quot; to Amherst, N. H., the evening of that cold Thursday, 1 and I am to read another at Fitchburg, February 3. I am simply their hired man. This will probably be the extent of my lecturing hereabouts.

I must depend on meeting Mr. Wasson some other time.

Perhaps it always costs me more than it comes to to lecture before a promiscuous audience. It

1 This was when he spoke in the vestry of the Calvinistic church, and said, on his return to Concord, &quot; that he hoped he had done something to upheave and demolish the structure above,&quot; the vestry being beneath the church.